Death Becomes Him: Noah Hawley on Bringing 'Fargo' to TV

Credit: Chris Large, Copyright 2014, FX Networks.It was an
interesting challenge, one that some said was crazy, maybe even stupid to try.
Take an iconic film more than two decades old, replace every major character
audiences originally loved, squeeze the new story into a brand-new format, and
ditch many of the traditional television writing conventions in the process.
For Noah
Hawley, the writer who rebooted the Academy
Award-winning filmFargo into a limited-run
series on FX, the creative challenges of thinking like a Coen brother while
writing like an original were too juicy to pass up. And he’s glad he did.
Calling the series “the highlight of my career” in an
interview with The Guardian, Hawley has been critically hailed for
his work and signed a two-year agreement with the network to potentially
develop a second season of the Midwestern thriller as well as other projects. Fargo’s
final episode air Tuesday, leaving fans hoping that another season, packed with
even bigger creative challenges, is on the way.

Get In Media: What attracted
you to this particular project?

Noah Hawley: There were a
couple of things. One, the challenge and the opportunity to make a Coen
brothers movie, which had such a unique mixture of, in this case, drama and
comedy and violence, but also more idiosyncratic storytelling, which you don’t
normally get the opportunity to do on television. Usually, they either want a
comedy or a drama and when you say to them, “How about some elements of
magic realism or farce or absurdity?” it’s usually hard to sell them on
that stuff, but in my case, I could say, “Well, I’m making a Coen brothers
movie.”

GIM: You’re best
known for creating your own worlds. What was it like to write within a world
that was already established?

NH: What’s
fascinating about Fargo is only the
first scene in the movie takes place in North Dakota, but that movie’s called Fargo because there’s something so
evocative about that word. In the case of stripping all the characters out of
the movie and still calling it Fargo,
it really became about telling stories in this universe, in this sort of frozen
tundra, a particular type of true crimes story that isn’t true. So, basically,
there were no limits for me. It was basically about, “Can I tell my own
story in this environment and tell it in such a way that it makes people think
of the original movie?” At no point did the network or studio tell me that
I couldn’t do something or that it didn’t feel Coen brothers enough. It just
happened to be what I felt like was a perfect marriage of my voice and their
voice in a way that never made me feel like I was imitating them.

GIM: How
did you capture the Coen brothers’ voice, but also have your own spin on it?

NH: A lot of it
was about looking at that movie and other movies of theirs, not with a
spreadsheet, but in terms of thinking about what are the elements that made the
original movie what it was?” Structurally, it’s a true-crime story. It’s
not a who-done-it, so you’re meeting the characters before the crime is
committed, which is really interesting. The police officer, Marge, didn’t come
into the movie until the crime had been committed and that was 30 minutes into
the movie, so the idea that you can bring important characters in at any point
in the story is really exciting. These true-story cases don’t unfold the way
that scripted narratives take place, so things happen that don’t fit neatly
into the big picture. That’s the idea that I would introduce Colin Hanks’
character in the last 10 minutes of the first episode. He’s a major character,
but he doesn’t come in until the end of the first episode because that’s when
his role in this story starts. All those elements that you bring in to try to
make it feel more like a real-life incident and less like, “Well, it’s a
pilot so all the important characters have to be introduced in the first 10 minutes.”

GIM: How did you
choose which elements from the original movie you were going to keep and what
you were planning to add?

NH: There are no
characters from the original movie
in the show, so that decision was made. I mean, once you’re not including
Marge, there’s no one really left. Everyone else is dead or in jail, basically,
from the original movie. I had an image of two men sitting side by side in the
emergency room, and one of them is a sort of mild-mannered civilized man with a
broken nose and the other, who is the other? That sort of Strangers On a
Train meeting felt very Coen brothers to me and then it was about figuring
out who were both men?

One of the great elements
about that movie is their version of the regional inability to communicate.
[William H.] Macy’s character, I don’t think he finishes a sentence in the
whole movie. There’s this sort of exaggerated politeness where you don’t even
want to make a declarative sentence for fear of offending someone by having an
opinion. The challenge of writing characters who manage to communicate their
point but not in the most direct way was a really fun exercise. Usually as a
writer, you’re looking for the perfect word to express something, but here the
idea was, “Why use one word when 10 words will do?”

GIM: Did working
on a limited-run series like this change or affect your writing process?

NH: Yeah, you know
that you’re telling a story with a beginning, middle, and an end. It’s very
liberating. If you know where you’re going then every step of the way becomes a
deliberate step in that direction. If you’re going, “Well, we’re going to
be on for seven seasons, we hope” and you were introducing a conspiracy
that [you’re] going to explore for four seasons, you end up with a lot of
open-ended pieces. In this case, we were writing a movie, really. It’s not a
television show in that it’s not designed to last. It’s designed to burn
quickly and therefore you can introduce major characters and you can give them
hugely dramatic moments and you can kill them off because you’re not worried
about, “Well, what if people love that character and we want them back in
Season 3?” It allowed me to make really specific choices and deliberate
choices to tell the story in the most dramatic way possible and I think you’ll
see it if you watch all 10 [episodes]. We don’t leave anything standing.

GIM: The last time
I interviewed you, you stated that with network television, the general rule is
that if you have 22 episodes, 12 of them are great, four of them are good, and
the rest are…

NH: Worse than that.

GIM: Yeah.

NH: Television,
historically, is the best you can do in the time allotted. [With only 10
episodes], having all the scripts written before you start filming, you’ve done
all the plotting and planning before you start. Then it’s just about executing that
vision. With television, usually you get 12 weeks before you start shooting and
if you’re lucky you’ll get three scripts in and you’ll plan out nine or 10
episodes and then, what’s going to happen in the remaining 12 episodes? You
don’t have any idea and so you’re writing outlines and the network is saying,
“Yeah, we don’t like that. Try a different story,” so then you just
run out of time. You get eight writers each knocking out an act of the script
and it’s not a graceful way to tell a story.

GIM: You guys have
done pretty well in terms of ratings. Do you feel like this project could
influence more networks to bring back films or other types of media as
television series?

NH: I don’t know.
It’s interesting to think about because people have been trying to reinvent
movies as TV shows forever. What I find most interesting is the idea that when
you hand a property to a writer with their own voice, like Hannibal for example to [series creator] Bryan Fuller, he has his
own voice and his own vision and his own style. He’s executing a version of
that story that is really unique and specific, versus when you say, “Let’s
turn The Firm into a TV show.”
You have to do something exciting and new with an existing property. You can’t
just copy the property. I mean, these people can go out and watch Fargo the movie, which is a masterpiece,
and if I were just to say, “Hey, I’m going to remake this masterpiece, but
just not as well,” no one’s really going to tune in. If I say, “You
know what that makes me think of? I told you this story of the time that Jerry
Lundegaard hired these guys to kidnap his wife and everything went crazy, but
did I tell you about the other time when Lester Nygaard…” It becomes
like you’re swapping stories with the Coen brothers, basically. They told us the story of Jerry Lundegaard and I’m saying,
“Hey, that makes me think of this story of Lester Nygaard.”